Charleston Elementary School guidance counselor Norma Gregory. Photo by Frances Mize/VTDiggerThis story is the second in a two-part series about apprenticeships in Vermont. Find the first story here.In late October, Norma Gregory walked a path circling the Charleston Elementary School that she’ll sometimes invite a student to join her on.A teacher might call Gregory, the school guidance counselor, if a student is “having a moment” and perhaps needs some extra attention or a chance to take a deep breath.“We just come out here to decompress,” she said. “Often, we don’t even talk.”Gregory, 63, landed her job just before the 2023 school year. “It’s been a dream come true,” she said.  “You’re trying to best equip these little children that have these big, huge emotions.”Her office is stocked with puppets, fidget spinners and kinetic sand. But as she sees it, that’s all accessory. Her task is mostly “about giving a kid the space to be themselves.”This year, Gregory joined the inaugural class of the Northeast Kingdom “Grow Your Own” Pathways program. As the state struggles to hire and retain educators, Gregory’s position is secured through a first of its kind apprenticeship for Vermont teachers. It’s meant to make it easier to get new talent through the door as the state’s schools continue reeling from a post-pandemic hiring slump.The apprenticeship, which is following trends in the state applying the earn-while-you-learn model to new industries, was “a real gift,” Gregory said. Her first job out of high school was a secretarial position with the Vermont Department of Corrections, and then she had a series of jobs with the state, including with state public safety dispatch and the Department of Labor, before retiring with full benefits when she turned 48.Retirement, though, wasn’t the end of the road for Gregory.“I knew I needed to go back to school,” she said. In 2023, she graduated from Northern Vermont University with a master’s degree in counseling (“I feel like a real lifelong learner,” she said), along with 600 hours of on-the-job training at the Charleston school through an internship program that was part of her degree. Charleston Elementary School. Photo by Frances Mize/VTDiggerWhen it came time to apply for a full-time position, it was a straightforward fit. But even though she got the job -– which had gone unfilled for a year -– her career pathway was pointed off a cliff. Gregory, without a teaching license, was working on an “provisional license,” which would expire in two years’ time. After that, “you’re walking out on a plank if you haven’t had someone helping you out,” she said.Gregory’s referring to a process called peer review, which requires educators who aren’t licensed through what the state refers to as the “traditional route to licensure” — the completion of a state approved educator preparation program at a college or university through a degree program — to compile a dense, complicated portfolio of skills and competencies. A transcript from her master’s degree in counseling wasn’t enough to certify her in the eyes of the state, nor were her hundreds of hours spent as an intern. “It was the scariest part of this whole thing for me,” Gregory said. “You have to submit so much stuff. I was lost in the weeds as soon as that started.”She pointed specifically to a dizzying flow chart compiled by the Vermont Agency of Education in an attempt to clarify the licensing process. “I’ve got a lot of years of work behind me, but when I saw that, I was like, what is this complicated process?”The need to make that process easier is acute.“In the past, we’ve said ‘We’ll post a position and get somebody qualified to fill it. It’ll just happen, right?’” said John Castle, executive director of Vermont Rural Education Collaborative, which runs the Grow Your Own program. “Well, we’re now in a time where we can’t afford to do that anymore.” The number of educators that have taken that “traditional route” to getting licensed has been dropping steadily over the past two decades. This year, there are over 850 teachers qualified through temporary licenses, according to data from the AOE. They’re at risk of losing their jobs if they don’t complete the arduous peer review process. READ MORE Freshly energized apprenticeship programs take on new industries by Frances Mize November 28, 2024, 9:21 amNovember 29, 2024, 10:12 am Rural communities, particularly in the Northeast Kingdom, historically have struggled to fill positions, Castle said. It’s especially tough with those positions that require specialized training and knowledge, such as high school math teachers, librarians and guidance counselors.Apprenticeships for teachers are still a relatively new idea. “If you go back five years, they just weren’t being done,” Castle said. But there have long been people waiting in the wings to get to work if they’re given the right support.“There are people like support staff or after school workers that don’t have a bachelor’s degree, but have the right qualities, dispositions, interests,” he said. “They’re already working in schools to become teachers, but they don’t have a pathway because they can’t leave employment to go into a traditional educational prep program.”Apprenticeships also make it easier to draw from the pool of prospective employees who already live near the schools they might be teaching at. Or, like Gregory, working there.“Sometimes, people will come to more rural communities, teach for a couple of years, and then move back to Chittenden County, or other communities that pay more,” Castle said.Along with Castle, Andrew Prowten, assistant director of education quality at the Agency of Education, began looking into work-based programming around 2022. Prowten manages a large share of the licensing process.With the influx of educators on emergency licenses, “what we were seeing was people with no teaching experience starting to work full-time and they weren’t getting the support they needed,” Prowten said. “Nor did they have the same level of training as some other candidates, or someone who just graduated from a college program.”  Charleston Elementary School guidance counselor Norma Gregory. Photo by Frances Mize/VTDiggerThe agency started collaborating with the Vermont-National Education Association, or VT-NEA, to produce mentoring and supplementary instruction on the basics of teaching.In the apprenticeship program, teachers get 144 hours of supplemental instruction under Juliette Longchamp, director of professional programs at VT-NEA — the teachers’ union. Seminars are meant “to synthesize what they’ve learned,” Longchamp said, and help them think about the evidence they’ll use in their peer review portfolios.“These are people that are already part of the communities,” Longchamp said. Once they’re licensed, the goal is that “they’ll grow into really great educators and those schools will have sustained staffing,” she said.Prowten hopes the program can attract people in later stages of their professional life, an alternative path to simply “delivering instruction through a traditional college program to someone who does really well on their SATs when they’re 18 years old.”He calls it a “high bar, but with a wide gate.” Gregory, the school counselor, reflected on her own winding career path. She said she never thought she’d have a college degree, or the opportunity to do the work she does.“I think when you get to this season in your life, you have this altruistic feeling and you want to help out,” she said. “I try to always remind the kids of how bright they are.”This story was produced with funding from the Higher Education Media Fellowship at the Institute for Citizens & Scholars. The fellowship supports new reporting into issues related to postsecondary career and technical education.Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘Wide gate’: Taking a new approach to training more teachers.